There exist many well-known devices that convert the energy of photons in the optical range into electricity, such as, e.g., photovoltaic cells (‘solar cells’). These devices are generally made up of at least two materials (i.e. silicon-based semiconductors) with different physical properties, such as different electron affinities (see, P. Würfel, The Physics of Solar Cells, 1st Edition, Wiley-VCH (2004)). When one of the materials is illuminated by sunshine, solar photons excite photoelectrons from a valence band into a conduction band, which provides electric mobility. The energy gap between valence and conduction bands is typically on the order of an electron-volt, which is similar to the energy of the incident solar photons. The arrangement of two materials with different electron affinities gives rise to an electric voltage across the material boundary, which may be tapped for electric energy.
There are, however, no known devices for conversion into electricity of energy from photons operating in the high-energy photon regime such as, e.g., XUV, X and gamma rays. Such devices could be used in a wide range of applications—for example, such devices could be used as energy converters for the conversion of high-energy photons emitted by radioactive materials such as, e.g., spent fission fuel rods, emitted from detonation sources such as, e.g., explosives, and emitted from high temperature plasmas and beams of accelerated particles, and as devices in space applications as power sources, shielding, and the like. Difficulties in providing such devices arise from the great penetrability of high-energy photons through matter, which is a consequence of much less interaction of such photons with matter when compared with visible light, and from the fact that for most materials the mean-free-path of electrons is typically many orders of magnitude shorter than the mean-free-path of high-energy photons. As a consequence of this disparity in mean-free-paths, electrons emitted from an atom in a material used to trap the high-energy photons tend to succumb to recombination while their energy converts to heat within the high-energy photon trapping material.
Thus, it is desirable to provide systems and methods that would facilitate the conversion of energy from high-energy photons into electricity.